As India grieves train crash that killed 275 people, relatives still wait for bodies of loved ones

So far only 45 bodies have been identified, and 33 have been handed over to relatives, said Mayur Sooryavanshi, an administrator who was overseeing the identification process at the hospital in the capital of Odisha state, about 200km south of the site of the train crash in Balasore.

Upendra Ram began searching for his son, Retul Ram, Sunday, after traveling some 850km from neighboring Bihar state. The one-day journey in a rented car was exhausting for Ram, who said Retul, 17, had been on his way to Chennai to find work.

After spending hours looking at photographs of the dead, Ram identified his son around noon Monday.

“I just want to take the dead body and go back home. He was a very good son,” said Ram, adding that Retul had dropped out of school and wanted to earn money for the family.

“My wife and daughter can’t stop crying at home. They are asking me to bring the body back quickly,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes with a red scarf he had tied around his head.

Friday’s deadly crash was one of the worst rail disasters in India’s history. Investigators said that a signaling failure might have been the cause of the disaster, in which a passenger train hit a freight train, derailing on the tracks before being hit by another passenger train coming in the opposite direction on a parallel track.

The collision involved two passenger trains, the Coromandel Express traveling from Howrah in West Bengal state to Chennai in Tamil Nadu state, and the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express traveling from Bengaluru in Karnataka to Howrah, officials said.

Authorities recommended on Sunday that India’s Central Bureau of Investigations, which probes major criminal cases in the country, open an investigation into the crash.